The Chainbearer (1845) is somehow the tenth from the last of James Fenimore Cooper's (1789--1851) books. Admittedly, people died younger and more suddenly in those days and there's nothing unlikely about an author still being in full spate at 62, but, geez, man, maybe relax and enjoy life a bit? Some of the books might have been a bit slapdash, but Chainbearer, and the "Littlepage Manuscripts" cycle of which it is a part, was a vocal intervention in the ongoing Anti-Rent War, which was a big thing at the time, even if it has slipped our minds today.
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I'm not going to spend much more time with Cooper this week, my point being nicely made by omission in the Wikipedia article, which introduces the novel thus:
Critical to the trilogy is the sense of expansion through the measuring and acquisition of land by civilization. The title The Chainbearer represents "the man who carries the chains in measuring the land, the man who helps civilization to grow from the wilderness, but who at the same time continues the chain of evil, increases the potentiality for corruption."[1] Chainbearers, also known as "chain men", were important figures in early America because the accuracy of surveys depended on their work, and they were often required to be sworn in before performing their duties. The central position of the "Chainbearer" allows Cooper to deal with the cultural lack of understanding that Native Americans had of European concepts of land ownership. This in turn allows Cooper to critique ownership in general.[2]It's, like, how can you write this without noticing either Lovejoy, for the European sense of "the chain" of dependency that connects all being, and the Great Covenant Chain between the Haudenosaunee and their European partners? I'd be fine with just gesturing at Lovejoy, because that's what I do, and that makes it right, but the Covenant Chain is a bit more relevant. I guess you excuse that by suggesting that the James Fenimore Cooper of 1845 was somehow completely ignorant of the central concept of Eighteenth Century American diplomacy. And, to be fair, he doesn't mention it, being on endlessly about how chains ensure covenants from the point of view of a real estate salesman. I would be happy with a parenthetical about how interstate diplomacy isn't what the book is about, and on we go. I'm as tired as the next person at the unsourced assertion that the United States was directly inspired by the Haudenosaunee, or any other Indian league. It's easy to go too far in one direction. My problem is that we are still where we arrived at some two hundred years ago: We have wiped the First Nations out of the history of colonial America and are arguing over which white owns the land.
Upstate New York is bizarrely compacted. A look at the map explains why: Albany is already 150 miles from New York City and the mouth of the Hudson, and the state as a whole is only 55,000 square miles. Still, my imaginative understanding of it was shaped by John Ford's 1939 Drums Along the Mohawk, which is primarily set in Deerfield, in what was then Schuyler, New York on the Mohawk River. The town centre of Schuyler is less than 13 miles, albeit across the river, from German Flatts, the cornland where the Mohawk and Governor Burnett settled the Palatines on the Burnetsfield Patent in 1722, and only 90 miles upriver from Albany. In terms of area this is not small except by continental standards. The Dutch patroonships were allowed a claim twenty miles deep along both banks of the river, and at that depth the land subject to New Netherlander authority solely in the Hudson Valley is larger than Ireland. Still, I was honestly not aware until I started staring at maps of the Hudson Valley that Saratoga, that decisive battle of the Revolutionary War, was fought on the Hudson, just fifteen miles north of Albany. (My shock was reinforced by the mistaken impression that Burgoyne's army had descended the Mohawk from Oswego rather than passing the more direct invasion route via the Lake Champlain water gap.)
So colonial, and especially Dutch, New York, was both large and small. Albany and New York are quite close by modern standards, and very distant by those of the Seventeenth Century. I was also surprised to learn that, at least in the world of the Nineteenth Century New York elite intellectual, the Rensselaerswyck, later the "Manor of Renesselaerwyck," was all but an independent principality. As a historian of Dutch fortresses, I was tickled to hear that Albany was carved out of the patroonship by deploying the same laws that allowed the walled city fortresses of Holland to seize their immediate surroundings as the "glacis" of the fortification, and plan their development. (Mainly by preventing tradespeople not members of the urban guilds from practicing there, but also restricting building, especially of flood defences.) Somewhat confusingly, the original patroonship had already been platted around Fort Nassau. On top of that, during Dutch rule and the first years of English, the resulting town was called "Beverwijick," and the word used almost interchangeably for the settlement and for its monopolist college of fur traders, with their suspect relationship with Montreal, up the Hudson and down the Richelieu.
At this point I am going to stop, because I do not know any but the baldest way of putting it: "Beaver" is vulgar slang for the female pudenda and by extension, women in general. No colloquial dictionary will admit to a date for the slang entering the discourse (unlike "merkin"), but the folk etymology does trace it to the fur trade, and the iconic association between a beaver pelt and a female pudenda does seem pretty obvious. The problem is that you cannot really make an argument for "Beaverwijck" meaning colloquially "Village of Women" without a stronger case than that.
So that identification is up the air. To be clear, a lot is. Fort Nassau wa founded "in 1613 or 1614" by the pioneering fur trader, Hendrik Christiaensen, who visited Manhattan in 1612, returned to Holland with Orson and Valentine Christiaensen, two sachem's sons. (Nephews, presumably, unless the local Lenape followed the Virginian practice of assimilating matrilineal to patrilineal lineages by marrying their own nieces). At what is now Albany, Hendrik Christiaensen promptly found himself in competition with the nineteen-year-old supercargo of Adriaen Block's trading ship, Jacques or Jacob Eelkens, a figure now identified as a Francophone from Rouen. Vernon Benjamin reports theories that Eelkens had previous contact with St. Lawrence Iroquoians, which would explain how he was able to out-trade Christiaensen and achieve a close relationship with the Mohawks (if that is who he was trading with.) If it all seems a bit thin, there is an ongoing controversy over the nature of the earliest Dutch agreements with the Mohawk, the origins of the Two-Row Wampum that signifies that agreement (whatever it was), and the Great Covenant Chain that arises from it.
Imposing the role of "middle ground" interpreter on Eelkens makes for the most plausible version of the story, especially after Hendrik Christiaensen fell afoul of the locals in a 1619 visit and was killed along with the greater part of his crew. Eelkens, in contrast, shows up again as a trader under an English flag in 1628. I notice the name "Eelkens" in one early Hudson valley genealogy, but I am not going to insert myself anywhere that a contemporary historian might have scrapped with a genealogist. Instead, I am going to push my way back to Amsterdam and the origins of the Rensselaerwyck, which was granted to Amsterdam jewel merchant Kiliaen Van Rensselaer in 1630, early in the history of the Dutch West Indies Company's rule over New Netherlands, but negotiated on the ground by Arent Van Corlaer, Kiliaen's great-nephew, New World deputy and the founder of Schenectady. This is about as much as we can say, because, although much better record keepers than their counterparts in New England, the New Netherlanders leave a great deal to be desired in terms of piercing the darkness.
What's weird about the Van Rensselaers is that the darkness extends to the Old World. It isn't exactly unheard of for a family of Hollander Jongkheeren to be obscure, but it is odd that their is no "Rensselae" in Holland to give them their name. Eugene Schuyler went over to the old country in 1879 to follow up on the family history, sixty years after the male line of the Van Rensselaers became extinct in Europe, and tracked down the family's patrimonial seat at Nykerk (which may once have born the name of Rensselaerwyck) near Amsterdam and found other memorials and monuments indicating the family's existence for three generations leading up to Kirliaen. They're certainly not made up, but they are a lot more obscure than one would expect, and Kirliaen himself combines an obscure father and a suspicious lack of church records with a meteoric rise up the social hierarchy. I have a feeling that this was all a bit embarrassing to the line of the lords of the manor of Rensselaerwyck in New York or they wouldn't be protesting so strenuously, but I'm not sure what it proves. Kirliaen's real "uncle" might have been some forgotten New World sachem, but is infinitely more likely to have been, if he existed at all, a founding director of the West Indies Company, or, a connection innocently dropped into the conversation a bit below, an Oldenbarnevelt.
Or, maybe, in insisting on subaltern agency I am getting the origin continent of my subjects-masquerading-as-objects wrong. [The Tokens? LOL!]
When I say that Dutch land records are obscure, I say it with feeling. The richest of all rich texts of white oppression of red is the purchase of Manhattan from a Lenape sept in 1626 by Governor Peter Minuit for "trinkets valued at only $24." In reality no such treaty or grant is known. We are told that the treaty was made, and we have a payment for a usufruct on Staten Island of the same period for 60fl. It seems ridiculous that Manhattan Island should go for a payment on the same order of magnitude as Staten Island, but there is the wampum belt, and the treaty behind it to explore, and the constant point that, in America, land is cheap, labour dear. The man who commands the labour might, in the end, receive more land than anyone today would think reasonable, as indeed had just happened upriver.
Personally, Minuit was then also clashing with the Dutch Reformed predikant assigned to the new colony Johannes Michaelius [Jonas Jansen Michielse] has suffered some memory holing by comparison with his successor, Everardus Bogardus, perhaps because in one of his surviving letters he is a bit too frank about Minuit being "not free from fornication," presumably with a First Nations woman.
However, behind both Zwaanendael and New Sweden is the figure of Samuel Blommaert, an Amsterdam trader with his fingers in may pies, most interestingly an abiding interest in Angolan copper, which he tried to sell into Europe to feed the arsenals of the Thirty Years War. (At least, this is one explanation for New Sweden, as it allowed his copper shipments to pass the Sound toll-free under a Swedish flag.) In noticing that New Sweden seemed almost more Angolan than Swedish, my attention is drawn to the connections between the distinguished gentlemen of the WIC and Africa, which are far closer than any speculated pre-settlement connection with North America. Furs and piracy might be very much on the mind of the investors and speculators behind New Netherlands, but what everyone who could, did, was plant tobacco. Which leaves me very much wondering about the state of the tobacco trade in Africa c. 1650. Could the Dutch and Swedish colonisation of the Middle Colonies have been driven by African imperatives?
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